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Most bat community ecologists conceptualize insectivorous bat assemblages as comprising at least three foraging ensembles — the “open-space” ensemble, the “edge/gap” ensemble and the “narrow-space” or forest interior ensemble. The ensembles are generally characterized by different combinations of wing parameters that facilitate flight in those habitats. What’s been less clear is how species differ in performance within these ensembles, and how any differences might map to wing morphology.

That’s what Julie Senawi set out to do as part of her PhD, assessing performance of 15 species of forest interior bats through a collision-avoidance. There are a number of challenges in inferring ability from performance on tests, so we borrowed form the social sciences and applied Rasch Analysis, a latent trait modelling approach related to Item Response Theory. Details of this approach and the findings were published this week and can be requested through my researchgate page:

Building Julie’s flight cage4 banks of strings that could be set to different inter-string distances made up the collision-avoidance experiment. Julie taking photos of the bats to extract wing dimensions

A great week for Iroro! First she won the Karl Koopman Award for a Student Oral presentation at the 49th North American Society for Bat Research (NASBR) meeting in Kalamazoo. Her talk was entitled “Competitors Versus Filters: Drivers of non-random Structure in Forest Interior Insectivorous Bat Assemblages along Elevational Gradients”.

Icing on the cake came from placing third in TTU’s “Three-Minute Thesis” competition

I was deeply honored to receive the Gerrit S. Miller, Jr Award from the North American Society for Bat Research at NASBR’s annual conference last week. The award is in recognition of “outstanding service and contribution to the field of chiropteran biology”. I am the 26th awardee in the Society’s 47-yr history, so it is very special to me!

The newest Miller Awardee about to be photobombed by one of the oldest (Roy Horst)

The fabulous plaque!

One of the best bits of the award is the complex conspiracies that go on to keep it a secret from the recipient until “the big reveal” at the conference banquet. Thank you to all the co-conspirators for making it so special — you know who you are!!!

We are pleased to announce that applications to the 2018 Kate Barlow award are now open – the closing date is 5pm, 4th December 2017.

The Kate Barlow Award aims to encourage the next generation of bat researchers by providing a substantive contribution towards the research costs of postgraduate students undertaking research that will benefit bat conservation, in honour of the late Dr Kate Barlow’s contribution to bat conservation.

The Kate Barlow Award is open to students anywhere in the world conducting research which has a direct relevance for bat conservation.

One award of up to £4,500 will be made, towards the costs of a bat research project of no less than 4 months duration.

In addition BCT will pay for the award winner to attend either the BCT National Bat Conference or another relevant bat research and conservation conference.

My colleague here at TTU, Dr Liam McGuire, has an awesome PhD position available. See the advert and contact details below:

The McGuire lab at Texas Tech University is looking for a highly motivated PhD student to work as part of an NSF-funded collaborative study of flying foxes and Hendra virus in Australia. The successful applicant will work with an international and multidisciplinary team of collaborators, seeking to understand how human influences affect Hendra virus spillover events. As human development clears native forest resources, flying foxes that are traditionally nomadic or migratory have increasingly established permanent resident camps in urban and peri-urban areas. The PhD student will lead efforts to study the nutritional ecology, foraging dynamics, energetics, and stress physiology of resident flying foxes compared to migratory populations. Experience working with bats is an advantage, but more important is experience with ecophysiology methods such as energetics, nutritional physiology, and stress physiology. Fieldwork will extend for periods of up to 1 year in Australia, and therefore the successful candidate must be independent, motivated, and well organized, able to work well with a large team of collaborators under challenging field conditions. Another PhD position related to the project will be available in the Plowright lab at Montana State University, focusing on immunology and virus dynamics in flying foxes.

Anticipated start date for the position is January 1, 2018. For more information about the project, contact Liam McGuire (liam.mcguire@ttu.edu). The position will be based at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, but extended periods of fieldwork will be conducted in Australia. Interested students should send a CV and brief summary of relevant experience to Liam McGuire (liam.mcguire@ttu.edu).

I am the guest editor for a special issue in the journal Diversity entitled “Diversity and Conservation of Bats”. Submissions are due before 31st March 2018, so plenty of time to pull together some great papers! The scope address the following: i) the diversity and distribution of bats; ii) the effect of human activities (e.g., landuse change, hunting, roost disturbance, climate change) on bat behavior, populations, diversity, distributions, or ecosystem function; iii) drivers of human activities that threaten bats (e.g., attitudes, knowledge, perceptions, economics); and iv) conservation applications, particularly those that evaluate evidence of success.

Kendra recently published in the journal and had a good experience with them. Once the article is accepted, it is up in the issue almost immediately, and the review process was also very efficient. So, I look forward to seeing submissions.

Kendra has a paper out today, with lead author Anna Willoughby and Kevin Olival from Ecohealth Alliance, in Diversity exploring the role of roosting ecology in patterns of viral richness and sharing among bat species. The authors compiled bat-virus associations (from previously published databases) and ecological traits to investigate the importance of roosting behavior on viral richness and sharing. Cave-roosting bats do not host greater viral richness than non-cave-roosting bats, but do exhibit a greater likelihood of sharing viruses, especially between species documented as co-roosting in the same cave.